Scalability != performance. In fact, having to scale your architecture significantly with growth may be a symptom of a poor application performance. Yet, with the rise of cloud and the abundance of automation and container tools that simplify scalability aspect of your system, performance considerations are often pushed to the back row. Building systems for high performance is not easy. It requires a lot of considerations – from technology selection to design decisions. And “the cloud” does not magically solve those problems for you. In this talk I’ll discuss common performance pitfalls across the stack and talk about useful techniques and examples that every application could benefit from.

There are a lot of great things about the cloud, but the “destroy and rebuild” philosophy which is really good for building a continuous delivery pipeline, really sucks when applied to troubleshooting production problems. When your application goes haywire, the most valuable engineering skill is not the the ability to bring up a copy of your system or even the knowledge of your technology stack (although it doesn’t hurt). It is the skill of understanding and solving problems.

Finding the root cause of the issue and mitigating it with minimal disruption in production is a must-have skill for engineers responsible for managing and maintaining production systems, which nowadays includes ops, dbas and devs alike. In this talk I will discuss the skills required to troubleshoot complex systems, traits that prevent engineers from being successful at troubleshooting and discuss some techniques and tips and trick for troubleshooting complex systems in production.

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with conference goers. Most attend numerous conferences, have great hallway discussions and yet, are too hesitant to submit a proposal with their story. The reasons vary, but the hesitation (or even fear) to present a topic publicly is pretty common in our industry. Being a fairly new speaker myself, I can relate to a lot of these concerns. Hence the reason for this talk.

This talk covers a few of the more common objections to public speaking, recommendations on how to address them as well as tips for new (and maybe veteran) speakers. Everyone has a story. That story should be heard.

There are plenty of materials on getting development and operations to work together. More conversations are happening around inclusion of other technology groups, such as DBAs and QA testers, into DevOps processes. That said, DevOps conversations has been largely devoid of talk about BizOps place at the table. The goal for any tech-centric group is not to build and/or architect the best technology, but rather to effectively support business. Yet, many of those groups are either not privy to or don’t bother understanding the business goals and overarching effects of the technical decisions made. In this talk I’ll discuss key areas and feedback points in every DevOps process fit for inclusion of business units in order to align technology and business goals and make your life easier.

With emergence of DevOps approach to application development, deployment and management developers get more and more involved in day-to-day system operations. Lately, there has been a popular point of view that developers should be included in oncall rotation on equal grounds with sys admins. While I don’t fully subscribe to that mentality, there are certain processes that must be implemented by every organization to get developers involved in production operation of the software they built. In this talk I’ll walk through different aspects of operational oncall responsibilities and discuss ways in which developers should (and should not) be involved in operation of production systems.

I gave a talk at DevOpsDays Denver, talking about collaboration of testing and monitoring and production troubleshooting.

Identifying and fixing issues in new code before deploying it to production is important for every software development cycle. However, relying on traditional testing methods in the age of Internet-scale data driven problems may prove to be incomplete. Identifying and fixing the issues in production quickly is crucial, but it requires insight into usage patterns and trends across the whole architecture and application logic. In this talk I touch on inefficiencies of some of the most common testing methods, provide real world examples of discovering odd edge cases with monitoring and offer recommendations on top-down metric instrumentation to help DevOps organizations with identifying and acting on business-effecting problems.

I gave an Ignite talk at DevOpsDays DC in Washington D.C based on my rant. In this talk I covered some of the most frequently seen and heard fallacies and misuses of the term “DevOps”.

DevOps has been a hot topic in the industry for some time now. A lot of people been talking about it. Some have built business models around DevOps-related tools and themes. There are even conferences and trade shows dedicated to DevOps-oriented things. People have made career around talking about it. In light of all of that, I find it chuckle-worthy that very few people actually know what DevOps is. So instead of trying to create a buzzword-infested definition of DevOps to suit my particular agenda, I’d like to talk about what DevOps is not.

The talk I gave at PHP World in Washington, DC. In this talk I presented the most common database-related performance bottlenecks that can happen in most PHP applications.

Being involved in performance audits on systems of every size, from start-up sites hacked together overnight, to a ginormous applications built by world-recognized brand companies, I’ve seen a lot of interesting (and sometimes very unique) performance issues in every level of the stack: code, architecture, databases (sometimes all of the above). But there are a few particular, very “Performance 101″, issues that (unfortunately) appear in a lot of code bases.

I recently was invited to join RSS Ray during his weekly radio program “Online Marketing with RSS Ray” broadcasted on WS Radio, to discuss the challenges in creating and operating business online. We covered a lot of great topics that would be relevant to anyone trying to either build or improve their web presence, starting from pointers on what to look for when selecting a vendor, to scalability and security considerations, and all the way to the tips on choosing the right CMS for your business. You can listen to the two-part podcast below.Continue reading Discussing business online